Sunday, January 3, 2010

My New Year's Resolutions

Hello again from Singapore, and a Happy New Year to all my readers!

I am writing this post today to let you know that I have just made my New Year's resolutions as shown below:

First of all, I will continue to work hard at French this year, and am determined to improve my French to the point where I can read French novels without consulting the dictionary. I intend to achieve this target by means of studying thousands of French words, idioms and slang. I would also like to improve my ability to speak French, by making conscious efforts to form sentences using the words and phrases that I have newly acquired.

Secondly, I've decided to update this English blog more often, so that I can expand my readership overseas. Currently, I am blogging far more frequently in Japanese than in English, and due to the language barrier my readership is basically limited to Japan only. I want to change this situation by taking away this language barrier and reaching out to readers from around the world. Seeing as I cannot speak or write in English as fluently as in Japanese, this will surely present some challenge for me, but I believe that practice makes perfect and that the more I write in English the more comfortable I become in this language, so I've decided to take on this challenge anyway.

Lastly, I will be posting YouTube videos more often than last year, in order to improve my presentation skills, be it in English, Japanese, Mandarin or French. Given that I'm still not used to making speeches, posting YouTube videos is a rather difficult task for me, but luckily the 4 videos that I have posted so far have received some favorable feedback from my viewers, so I'm really encouraged to shoot more videos going forward. I am currently planning to shoot a video in French, so please keep a lookout!

I am determined to make good on my New Year's resolutions mentioned above, and make 2010 another wonderful year for my personal development.

I know I should be blogging more often in English, but being a lazy person by nature, I always seem to take the path of least resistance and blog almost exclusively in Japanese. I really should make more effort to keep up my English!

By the way, I've learnt from your blog that you are making headway in improving your Chinese through your own method. Many congratulations! Can I expect to see your first video in Chinese in the near future?